Arlington is developing rules for data centers before a proposal is pending: the city’s current code does not yet set out how to permit them. On Tuesday, council members received draft ordinances addressing where different kinds of facilities could operate and what standards they would have to meet.
The drafts would add provisions for siting, design and operation, including lot size, setbacks from homes, noise limits and water use and discharge requirements such as closed-loop systems, according to Fort Worth Report coverage of the city’s groundwork.
Kenneth Bloom, Arlington’s land development assistant director, told the council that the city has limited land left to work with. One enterprise data center already operates off Interstate 30 in north Arlington; D.R. Horton uses it to process the homebuilder’s internal data and operations. Arlington has seen little additional interest from companies, and the city is about 95% built out, according to KERA, making large campuses less realistic than smaller facilities.
How the Draft Rules Would Shape Facilities
The draft would treat stand-alone data centers as high-impact uses. They could be permitted in light industrial or industrial manufacturing districts with a specific use permit, or in a planned development district if the project is specifically identified. Proposed limits include a 300-foot separation from homes, a maximum building height of 75 feet and a ban on evaporative cooling. Enterprise centers—typically 5 to 10 acres and used primarily by one company—and stand-alone facilities would also have to meet daytime and nighttime noise limits, with sound testing before and after construction.
For data equipment integrated into other uses, the proposal distinguishes between co-located and accessory facilities. Co-located data centers could operate as accessories inside multi-tenant buildings; a late-September council agenda described them as having a moderate chance of coming to Arlington. An accessory-designated data center could be in any nonresidential zoning district if tied to the building’s primary use. Bloom offered an example: “A financial services company might have three stories in the building that they might use, one for their data center uses.” Those accessory setups could not use evaporative cooling or outdoor backup generators, but could use battery energy storage systems depending on their size. The batteries store grid electricity for use during a power outage.
Edge centers are smaller facilities that process data near end users to reduce network delays; they can also be installed as box-style equipment accessories inside or near larger buildings. The proposal caps them at 200 square feet of surface area and 12 feet in height. KERA reported that they typically need 100 kilowatts to 1 megawatt of power and, when freestanding, occupy 1 to 2 acres. City staff told the council these facilities have a high probability of being built in Arlington because of their modest footprints.
Council Member Pushes for Noise Modeling
Council member Brittney Garcia-Dumas said she wants any future data centers kept as far from homes and residents as possible, and voiced support for requiring noise modeling before permits are issued rather than after facilities are already running. “I’m in favor of the modeling … so that we can really look out for our residents as we are also looking out for our economic future,” she said.
Bloom told the council the proposals drew on research and ordinances from around the country and state, tailored specifically to Arlington’s circumstances, and cautioned that the regulations are still subject to change. The council’s work on the issue follows a presentation on data center types the body received in late September, part of a broader effort to get ahead of a technology that other Texas cities are already scrambling to regulate after the fact.
What the Drafts Would Allow—and Their Status
Under the proposals, stand-alone facilities could seek permits in specified industrial districts or in a planned development district if specifically identified; accessory facilities could operate in nonresidential zones when tied to a building’s primary use. The council received draft ordinances, and Bloom said the rules could change. The account describes no final adoption or later revision. The local discussion comes amid broader projected demand, but statewide forecasts should not be read as Arlington-specific. ERCOT said its 2025 transmission-provider request for information included 55 GW of additional data center load supported by officer letters for forecast year 2030. That figure is a planning input, not a count of built facilities or a forecast of demand in Arlington.
How Other Texas Cities Have Responded
Arlington isn’t alone in trying to get ahead of the data center boom. Statewide, Texas has more than 335 operating data centers and 247 proposals, according to the Environmental Defense Fund as cited by The Real Deal, while the Texas Observer separately reports more than 400 data centers operating or under construction statewide. The Real Deal’s reporting notes that cities have been adopting rules in response to residents’ mounting concerns about water usage, noise pollution and tax incentives.
Those concerns have already reshaped policy elsewhere in North Texas and beyond. Mesquite introduced regulations in June requiring technical and noise studies, a water impact plan and a utility demand analysis, while Lewisville banned data centers in residential areas that same month and now requires developers to obtain a special-use permit. North Richland Hills began requiring special-use permits and public hearings for new applications in July, and El Paso County adopted similar permitting requirements along with resource-use disclosures and a 300-foot separation from residential neighborhoods. Kerrville went further in May, prohibiting data centers within 500 feet of parks, schools, hospitals, churches, childcare facilities and residential zoning districts, plus a 300-foot setback from arterial roads.
Water use is a central worry behind those rules. The Texas Observer reports that a small-to-mid-sized data center is estimated to require about 300,000 gallons of municipal water per day, and the Houston Advanced Research Center has projected that statewide annual data-center water consumption could reach between 29 billion and 161 billion gallons by 2030. In Taylor, a development agreement for a proposed campus includes a minimum 300-foot setback on three property lines and a 700-foot setback on the fourth, caps noise at the property line at 65 decibels or the predevelopment baseline, and requires the project to connect to the city’s water system rather than drill wells or draw from the aquifer beneath the city, according to CBS Austin.
Noise remains one of the most persistent complaints nationally. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, data centers emit noise from cooling systems, diesel generators and fans that can be heard hundreds of feet away, and the combined hum of thousands of servers in a single facility can reach 96 decibels, with some facilities located within 50 feet of homes. The organization also notes that cooling systems typically account for about 40% of a data center’s electricity use, and that systems skipping water cooling tend to run louder. Those pressures have already changed outcomes elsewhere: Chandler, Arizona, tightened its zoning code in 2022 to make data centers harder to site, and its city council unanimously rejected a new proposed facility in 2025 after noise concerns drove local opposition.
